Notes From the Ungerground

An inside look at the new scent-obsessed culture

It's not hard to come up with a reason to linger at the Four Seasons Resort on Maui's Wailea Beach: white sand fine as face powder; poolside mango smoothies; and the occasional sight of Pierce Brosnan gliding to shore on a paddleboard with mesmerizing precision. Still, some people who come here couldn't care less about such frivolous distractions. They're here for the scent. Not in the naturewalk sense, either—they come specifically to inhale the sandalwood, maile vine, and jasmine in Palena'ole, a custom-blend eau that hovers in an all but subliminal nimbus around the entire property. (The local breezes, though lovely, smell primarily of nice, plain beach air; the hotel augments Mother Nature with discreetly hidden electronic diffusers.)

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Jane Hendler, cofounder of the Carmel, California, niche perfumery Ajne Rare and Precious, and the creator of Palena'ole, says flying halfway across the Pacific (or farther) just to experience a fragrance isn't all that strange. Not among her devotees. "One of our clients has a spray for her pillow and one for her sheets, perfumes for each of the seasons, and a minifridge in her bathroom in which to store them, so they feel cool on her skin," Hendler says. "But that's nothing. One man told us he had a dedicated fragrance room with more than 1,000 bottles. Another customer buys a new bottle of our Savoir—that's $180—once a month. I'm not complaining, but it's, like, what, are you drinking it?"

If Hendler stirred up a potable version, they just might. A new class of fragrance consumer is mushrooming faster than you can say "World Wide Web": perfume fanatics, supersniffers who collect, study, debate, and review every eau they can get their hands on. They seek out esoteric notes, celebrate superior drydowns, host sniffing parties, and swap samples of their latest discoveries. Perfumers—once an anonymous breed tucked away behind the billboards and beribboned boxes of fragrance marketing campaigns—are their Picassos. Bergdorf's beauty floor is their MoMA.

"They're like wine lovers, cheese lovers, car enthusiasts," says Ron Robinson, the owner of Apothia, the beauty boutique at L.A.'s celeb-beloved Fred Segal—and the innovator behind its culty, eponymous fragrance collection. "They love anything that's going on, olfactorywise." Selling to them requires more than waving a scent strip under their ultraattenuated noses. "This isn't like trying to explain the difference between grapefruit and patchouli," he says. "They want to know the nuances: Does grapefruit come into play in the beginning or end? What is the balance?"

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The answer to the obvious question—if fragrance has been around for centuries, why now?—is the same reason a million other seemingly unique hobbyists suddenly belong to 10,000-member fan clubs: the Internet. On blogs like Nowsmellthis, BoisdeJasmin, PerfumePosse, and countless others, previously isolated fragrance freaks have found a buzzing community. "That started a whole new culture," Robin son says. "Like a book club, you get new perspectives.You increase your knowledge." Knowledge they have in spades. The blogosphere is equally atwitter about the appointment of Thierry Wasser, Guerlain's new nez, as it is about, say, the recent, unexpected reappearance of a little known Chanel juice called Beige (launched by Coco along with Rouge and Bleue back in 1929, but apparently not forgotten).

The Web also provides common ground for an obsession that nonsniffers might regard as, er, unusual. When a writer on Nowsmellthis conducted an experiment to see how much perfume he owned, spritz for spritz, he figured that, at 735 sprays per 50 milliliter bottle, his relatively conservative 27-bottle stash was enough to provide 14.5 years of daily doses. "When I first did these calculations, I spent several days in a semidepressed state," he writes. "How could I resist buying more perfumes?" His online cohorts were quick to assuage his guilt—27? Next to nothing. Think of what footwear fanatics spend on a bunch of meaningless shoes!—and the conversation quickly turned to how to best array the bottles you have, while continuing to purchase more. One said her 190-plus bottles were in the fridge, while "hundreds of samples and decants are in drawers in my bedroom, organized in alphabetical and size groups."

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For some fragrance fanatics, scent is simply the sense with which they compute everyday life; its impact on their experiences—processed in the hippocampus, the brain's memory bank, and the amygdala, its emotional control panel—more instinctual than intellectual. A nostalgic 70-year-old commissioned Jane Hendler to re-create the discontinued dews of her youth, including one that, "when she wore it down the street, made men turn their heads and follow follow her," Hendler says. Robinson remembers the Bay Rum his grandfather wore in the '50s and recalls meeting his wife while wearing the British brand Czech & Speake. (Apothia still sells it.) Others just seem to have been gifted with superior sniffers. Why else can certain noses discern Arpege versus Armani on a morning subway commute, while others detect little more than eau de B.O.? Hendler says scent immediately shifts her to the right brain, into a spacey, creative mode. "Some people get almost high. They find it transporting, disorienting. They could drive right off the curb," she says. "That's what they love about it."

"It would be wonderful to have an orchestra follow us around all day and play a movie soundtrack to match our mood," says Tania Sanchez, who, along with her fragrance (and life) partner, perfume critic Luca Turin, wrote the 2008 scent fanatic bible, Perfumes: The Guide (Viking). "Wearing perfume is a little bit like that. It scores the day. It makes breathing, ordinarily a purely functional thing, bring a little bit of beauty into you with each breath."

Sanchez is the perfect example of an Internet-enabled scenthead. When she stumbled upon the fragrance boards at Makeupalley.com, she had just a small collection. Now she owns some 2,500. (Of course, she's quick to point out, "I needed them to write the book!")

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"The thing about perfume is that, for most of us who like it, it's been difficult to tell anybody why," Sanchez says. "Thanks to the Crayola box, you've got these weird 11-year-olds who know the difference between burnt sienna and raw umber. But they don't know if something smells like fennel as opposed to, say, oak moss. One of the joys of getting online was getting this vocabulary and being able to talk about something you really love, finally, with other people." With Turin, Sanchez developed one of the most distinctive voices in fragrance writing. In Perfumes: The Guide, which rates some 1,500 juices on a five-star scale, one celebrity fragrance is categorized as an "evil tuberose," a "hair-singeing horror, probably first rejected for use as industrial drain cleaner." The five-star Prescriptives Calyx, on the other hand, is compared to "a perfectly tuned choir out of which you cannot distinguishany individual voice."

"Most of us get on this journey saying, I'm going to buy one perfume and wear it forever. I just have to find The One," she says. "But it's not like polygamy if you happen to buy multiples. You start to buy more, and then suddenly it's hard to be in denial... you're a collector." Obsessionwise, though, Sanchez has nothing on "the Karens."

As the organizers of Sniffapalooza, a sort of online fragrance fan club whose members meet for in-person sniffing expeditions everywhere from New York to Paris to Florence, Karen Dubin and Karen Adams are two of the most visible leaders of the eauosphere. Dubin's collection ("I stopped counting at 350, and that was years ago," she says) is currently unavailable for viewing, due to an apartment renovation. Instead, she suggests meeting at Aedes de Venustas, a gilded fragrance boîte on Christopher Street in Manhattan that looks straight out of a Victorian Gothic novel, and which stocks hundreds of smallish, artisanal fragrance brands from around the globe. "That's kind of like seeing my collection," says Dubin. "I own almost everything in there anyway." (This is not hyperbole.)

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The Karens are sort of an odd couple. Dubin, a casting director for commercials, is a petite, type-A New Yorker who talks a mile a minute. Adams, who lives in Connecticut and works in her husband's dental practice, is tall and as mild-mannered as her partner is verbose. They have different tastes in sniffs, too: Dubin falls for anything vetiver; Adams is addicted to post-hippie patchoulis. What they have in common, however, is a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of and unquenchable curiosity about scent. Their short list of Aedes favorites is anything but; the highlights include L'Artisan Parfumeur's Pouivre Piquant ("purifying, powdery, cleansing") and Parfums DelRae's Bois de Paradis ("like candlelight on skin").

Sniffapalooza started six years ago when Dubin organized a Bergdorf binge for three online friends. Now its network is 500,000 strong. Believers fly in from Germany, Switzerland, and France for Sniffapalooza events. And while the Karens started out politely asking perfumers and fragrance companies for face time and products, now the industry comes to them. On their last major tour, in Florence, Adams says, "we got the royal treatment": breakfast at Ferragamo's residential palace; chocolate mint tipples and an all-access tour at Santa Maria Novella, Catherine de'Medici's favorite farmacia; iris-infused chocolates at the farm that produces powdery bulbs for the boutique brand i Profumi de Firenze; and a custom-blending lesson with celebrated Italian blender Laura Tonnato.

The Sniffas (as Hendler calls fragrance disciples) aren't just along for the ride, either. "They do their research," says Robert Gerstner, the co-owner of Aedes de Venustas. "They have color-coded lists, spreadsheets—pages and pages of everything they plan to smell at each stop. They're not going home saying, `Oh, I forgot to smell this one!' "

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The Karens insist that, to Sniffas, perfumery is as an art, without distinctions of high and low—whether the box is emblazoned with interlocking Cs or bears Hilary Duff's face. "We're not snobs," Dubin says, vehemently. "We want to smell everything from Wal-Mart to Bergdorf." Still, it doesn't take long on the fragrance blogs to figure out that, in their world, professing to love something that's readily available on any old department store counter is considered vaguely lazy, gauche—not unlike bringing a bottle of Trader Joe's cheap-and-cheerful Charles Shaw to an oenophile's tasting party. Sniffas want to know the story behind a perfume. They want concept, insight. "Sniffas want the most sophisticated, the most complex fragrance," Hendler says. "Ingredients like oris root and agarwood, which are rich, deep, more of an acquired taste—like a great, big cabernet."

Sanchez has a name for those who demand the weird and wacky: stage fivers. "Every fanatic goes through a stage where they're desperate to find really strange stuff," she says. "It applies to all types ofconnoisseurs—it's like people who need to climb over dusty boxes and use a password to get into a restaurant." A former stage fiver, Sanchez has evolved to stage six, that of the equal opportunity connoisseur. "If you can't see that Stetson is a really great fragrance because it costs $12 at the drugstore, then that's a problem," she says.

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Still, with increased awareness has come a ravenous demand for the new and the now. Niche perfumery is up 60 percent since 2005, despite the fact that the niche prices start at roughly $100 for 50 milliliters, while the average cost of a scent that size is $31.

This is good news for businesses like Apothia and Aedes, which have specialized in smaller brands since their inception. But Robinson appreciates the boom for more than just its bottom line: He sees it as a chance for perfumery—not just sales imagery—to take center stage. Ad campaigns that tell you little more than "you're going to look like this model on the side of this bus" are, he says, "a disservice to the customer. They tell you nothing about how beautiful the process of creating a scent really is." Robinson is working on an eau that celebrates his 30 years at Fred Segal. His brief to his perfumer, he says, includes "coming to work early in the morning in the '70s when the gardeners were watering all of the flowers on the side of the building. It smelled so fresh. And in an alleyway in the back, there was this whiff of pot: Rock stars were always dropping by the fabric store next door to get supplies for their costumes." The fact that the architecture of a scent can layer his memories, creating something with a beginning, middle, and end—"that's pretty cool," Robinson says. "But it takes a certain kind of person to appreciate it."

Learn the Lexicon Brush up on heart notes and drydowns at Basenotes.net, a virtual scent encyclopedia, or OsMoz.com, an exhaustive online directory operated by the French fragrance firm Firmenich. If your nose can't tell osmanthus from olibanum, educate it: Look for individual essential oils at your local health food store. "Once you've smelled the root of an iris, you'll know when you smell it again," says Apothia's Ron Robinson.

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Shop Like An Expert Most fragrance boutiques and luxury department stores hand-spray samples upon request. Tania Sanchez suggests toting your own empty glass vials—if they run out of sample sizes, you've got your own. Aedes.com and Luckyscent.com sell hundreds of one-ounce samples for only a small shipping charge. And when you're ready to invest, Sephora's newest gadget, the Scentsa Fragrance Finder, takes the guesswork out of selection by searching by favorite note or fragrance category.

Enroll Now Cinquieme Sens, a 32-year-old French olfactory institute that once trained only professionals, opens a Manhattan outpost this fall. Choose a two-day course on fragrance traditions and techniques or a daylong "discovery" class specifically for the lay enthusiast.

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